The Unquiet Ones: A History of Pakistan Cricket

The definitive history of a cricket team the world loves to watch, but is at a loss to explain The story of Pakistan cricket is dramatic, tortured, heroic and tumultuous. Beginning with nothing after the Partition of 1947 to the jubilation of its victory against England at the Oval in 1954; from earning its Test status and competing with the best to sealing a golden age by winning the World Cup in 1992; from their magic in Sharjah to an era-defining low in the new millennium, Pakistan's cricketing fortunes have never ceased to thrill. This book is the story of those fortunes and how, in the process, the game transformed from an urban, exclusive sport into a glue uniting millions in a vast, disparate country. In its narration, Osman Samiuddin captures the jazba of the men who played for Pakistan, celebrates their headiest moments and many upheavals, and brings to life some of their most famous - and infamous - contests, tours and moments. Ambitious, spirited and often heart breaking, The Unquiet Ones is a comprehensive portrait of not just a Pakistani sport, but a national majboori, a compulsion whose outcome can often surprise and shock, and become the barometer of everyday life in Pakistan, tailing its ups and downs, its moods and character.

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THE UNQUiET ONES
A History of Pakistan Cricket
OSMAN SAMIUDDIN
For Abbu, who missed this, and Mama.
And my six girls.
Contents
Prologue
SECTION 1: THE ARRIVAL
1. The Oval Triumph
2. The Fields of Lahore
3. Karachi Beats and the Rest
4. The BCCP and Pakistan
5. Abdul Hafeez Kardar, of Pakistan
6. Ahead We March
7. Tuning In
8. The Brylcreem Man
SECTION 2: THE REGRESSION
9. The Disaster of 1962
10. The Lost Years
11. Operation One Unit
12. Turf Wars
13. The Solitary Master
14. One Word, a Thousand Pictures
SECTION 3: THE TRANSFORMATION
15. Sydney, 1977
16. Setting Up Shop
17. Domestic Bliss
18. Pakshire
19. The Revolution Will Be Televised
20. The Professionals
Photo Section
SECTION 4: THE HIGH
21. The 1992 World Cup
22. Spreading the Love
23. Making the World Go Round
24. The Transformer
25. Desert Rose
26. The Quest for Izzat
SECTION 5: THE UNRAVELLING
27. The Court of Qayyum
28. The Office
29. Left-Arm, God
30. Uneasy Lies the Crown
31. Live Fast, Bowl Faster
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
Prologue
3 March 2014 passed by without much retrospection. There was no time for it. There never is. When a country is in the process of hurtling violently and furiously towards its definition every single day, retrospection is an unnecessary pit stop. In fact, Pakistan woke up to another day of war – a militant gun and bomb attack – this time at a district court in Islamabad in which at least eleven people were killed. Soon it would be reduced to the coldness of a statistic, another number for news agencies to use, trying to smash down the complexity of war into digestible form. This time, it was by a group splintered from the terrorist mothership Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, the militants who want to take over the country. This is no conventional war though, not least because any kind ; of war requires there to be another side—the state in this case—fighting back committedly and persistently. The Pakistani state has not. Soon there would be another attack, then another and then another; such has been the swarm of violence, the only feasible response to one attack is to wait for the next, and in the meantime, living on.
Had there been time or inclination for retrospection, it would have been noted that on a morning exactly five years ago, Pakistan cricket began its sixth—and potentially most pivotal—age. Terrorists struck a convoy carrying the Sri Lankan team from their hotel to Gaddafi Stadium in Lahore to play the third day of the second Test on that tour. Six people died and a number of Sri Lankan cricketers and match officials were injured. The Test was abandoned immediately, the touring players flown out, and international cricket came to a juddering halt in Pakistan. Until whenever it was to return, the last ball of that match was eventful and pregnant with symbolism: Salman Butt was run-out when there appeared no feasible way for a bowler to dismiss him. The needless self-inflicted damage represented a broader truth about the country, its cricket and the pass to which both had come. (Butt would also all but end his career by his own actions over a year later.)
So for all the transformation, the surge, the troughs, the development and the decay in the following pages, in a sense, we are still amidst what may yet be Pakistan cricket’s most significant age. Half a decade can feel a long time but in assessing the toll no international cricket will take on Pakistan, or how drastic its effect will be, it is not yet long enough.
A tangible imprint has been left on the economy of the game. The lack of home internationals has taken a financial toll, primarily because the cost of staging a ‘home’ game outside the country has increased greatly. Since that fateful day, Pakistan has hosted the majority of its matches in the UAE, in addition to a couple of Tests in England. A rough estimate by Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) officials places the cost of arranging each Test and one-day series in the UAE at approximately $1 million more than in Pakistan. But the consequences are not as dire as immediately imagined, or not yet anyway. The relocation to the UAE has also meant higher overall revenues. Pakistan covers the cost of staging matches there and shares money at the gate, which is also higher than what they would raise in Pakistan. Net gate income, for example, can touch close to a million dollars for tours, figures they couldn’t imagine in Pakistan. Additionally, sponsorship with UAE-based companies generate bigger windfalls, sometimes almost double of what they would get from a sponsor in Pakistan. It may still not be profitable, but it has stanched the bleeding.
A very conservative estimate of the loss of potential revenues from cancelled and relocated tours would be around $100 million. It will take time before a more definitive picture can be drawn, however. And during that time, the PCB will consider bigger, trickier questions. Should they spend money on upgrading stadiums that are currently not making money and are considerably outmoded, compared to other venues around the world? Or should they risk letting them slide further, making cursory revamps and wait until they know world cricket will return before making that investment? In any case, they can hardly afford to build new stadiums, such as those the PCB has done recently in Islamabad and Sind, to appease political patrons; these are just white elephant stadia.
So deeply is cricket burrowed into the country, though, let’s for a moment consider the impact of the attacks on other industries. In an evaluation of the effect, the PCB found that a car rental company they had contracts with, sold off half their fleet. A large number of their drivers were laid off; the PCB provided them a regular, steady tranche of business, employing their cars, buses—some had been imported—and drivers for fixed periods whenever cricket teams toured. The bigger hotels used to shape their budget around the prospect of a busy home season, with at least two international series, settling with the PCB in advance how many of their high-end, high-profit rooms would be booked during the winter. Hotel renovations were often approved with big tours in mind, and one hotel had to dismiss refurbishment plans once international cricket stopped. A multitude of other businesses, small, medium-sized and large, operating in the economy that cricket created have been similarly affected.
All this is just what we can measure. What of the effects on Pakistan’s players, for example? Some, like the young, promising batsman Azhar Ali, have never played an international match at home and may never do so. He and his contemporaries trained for years, attended camps and played domestic matches on the same grounds, in front of familiar crowds, of friends and family. Now they play without any of those comforts, a situation no other cricketer finds himself in. What of those aspiring to play for Pakistan? How will the absence of cricket in Pakistan shape them, not as athletes alone, but as humans? It takes a toll, on someone as senior as Younis Khan or as young as Junaid Khan. Travelling schedules for the international cricketer are ridiculous already, but what of a team that doesn’t ever play at home? Transplanting a home season of four to five months abroad has begun to have a physical and mental impact on players, an impact they have done well to not use as an excuse.
And beyond the players, there’s the game itself. Who can say how this age will play out, how not having matches to go to and not watching cricket stars will impact children? There is a partial precedent in the example of South Africa, who were banished from international cricket altogether for over two decades because of apartheid. They maintained their domestic set-up with rigour however, ensuring that when they did return at the end of 1991, the team was a strong one and domestic cricket robust. In a sense, their situation was even worse: not only was there no international cricket in the country, but their side was also barred from all international cricket.
A common reaction has been to wonder whether cricket will wither away. The prospect had actually been raised even before the Lahore attacks, over 2007 and 2008, by when a number of teams were already hesitant to tour Pakistan and the 2008 Champions Trophy had been shifted because of security concerns. After all, 9/11 and the ensuing war in Afghanistan affected no country as much as Pakistan; we should be talking of the tolls of over a decade, not just the last five years. Since that day, of all ten Test-playing countries, only Zimbabwe has played less Tests at home. The International Cricket Council (ICC) set up a task force to help, but as Pakistan lost itself in a maze of self-created crises—most notably the spot-fixing scandal in 2010—the remit of the task force expanded, bewildered by the realization that curing Pakistan cricket is an overwhelming task. Their eventual report in 2011 had sixty-three recommendations on better governance and the need for integrity, but very little on the prospects of surviving without international cricket. It was noble, but nobility will do little to lessen the impact of losses of over $150 million since 9/11.
Fretting about the end of cricket is understandable, but it is also overwrought, because it underestimates the depth to which cricket has embedded itself in the Pakistani conscience. One perverse way of looking at the attacks after all, was as a reaffirmation of its elevated place in the state of Pakistaniat. It was an important enough symbol for it to be attacked by those wanting to create a new country.
It also overlooks that Pakistan appears to live fullest when imagining its own imminent death. It is at—and for—this moment when the mind reconciles itself to a meltdown that Pakistan stirs and fights and burns bright. Accordingly, cricket itself has never felt more central to life as it has over the last five years. In triumph, in defeat, in scandal, in drama, in terror, in outrage, cricket has been a clear reflection of a living, breathing nation; somehow with each new blow, each imagined death, the fire has burnt so bright and beautiful it not only made you stare, but also want to touch it and maybe, even be engulfed within it.
Perhaps, there are even signs of hope because Pakistan has begun to look inwards for sustenance. Domestic Twenty20 tournaments, some organized by the PCB and others by former players, have proved to be wildly popular, each generating a strain of feel-good national hysteria, and taken as proof of the game’s good health. The PCB has been trying to get off the ground its own lucrative Twenty20 league, along the lines of the Indian Premier League (IPL). Though its inception has been troubled, if it does start, there is enough commercial potential for it to be a valuable source of income.
In a typically circuitous manner, the board itself has somehow emerged from a farcical 2013 looking a little healthier than it has been for some time. The chairmanship switched between Zaka Ashraf and Najam Sethi through 2013-14 on a near monthly basis, bringing the board’s long-term planning to a halt. It wasn’t entirely the board’s doing. A newly emboldened judiciary, eager to stamp its influence on the country, meddled deeper than was its remit in the board’s workings, sparking administrative mayhem in May 2013. At the end of it, miraculously, emerged a viable board constitution, perhaps the most democratic (a relative assessment) it has had since the one in 1995. The chairman’s powers were curtailed, or at least, there were greater checks on him from other bodies. Regional associations, emaciated since the turn of the century, were given clear pathways to greater autonomy.
In April 2014, the PCB also joined world cricket’s Faustian pact, in which the seven financially weakest boards ceded control over the game, their influence and independence to the strongest three – India, Australia and England. In return, the Big Three, as they came to be known, offered what they claimed would be greater financial rewards in a new world order. One of the conditions of the PCB in agreeing was the revival of its lucrative rivalry with India, in cold storage since the end of 2007. The two boards signed up for six series in eight years from 2015, the revenues from which—if they do happen—can secure the PCB’s financial future. The cost will be a reduced position globally in a less democratic, world governing body.
When the Big Three calculated a new graded system of how ICC money will be redistributed to boards based on what each ‘contributed’ to the game, the PCB found itself in fourth place. The calculations were opaque, based on a number of factors, but they rewarded an overall current and historic contribution to the game. That Pakistan found itself that high up the order was remarkable because neither is their team as historically strong as South Africa’s nor their board as well administered as New Zealand’s. There was enough doubt about the nature of such calculations and the motivations behind them, but that the PCB found itself, in a sense, the best from the rest was a reaffirmation of their status even in this period of great strife: not consistently good enough to be among the best, but enough of a draw to warrant serious consideration at all times.
*
Perhaps it wasn’t that there was no time for retrospection. Maybe it was just that the evening before the fifth anniversary of the terror attacks, Shahid Afridi helped Pakistan forget about that morning in Lahore. In the last over of an ODI against India in Dhaka in the Asia Cup, he won the match Pakistanis want to win most. He did it despite having done his best to lose it. He crossed over for a single when he shouldn’t have off the last ball of the previous over, leaving a tail ender to face the first ball of the last with 10 runs still needed to win. A wicket fell off the first ball and a single was scrambled off the next. Nine to win, a wicket left and four balls: Afridi hit two sixes—both mis-hits—and sealed it. Pakistan, of course, was ecstatic but the moment was immensely contagious too, around the world. It was also a reaffirmation: for all the turbulence of their modern age, a basic character forged in Pakistan’s earliest years, an unquiet that cannot be ignored, was intact.
It was a fitting win in many ways, not least because it was delivered by Afridi, someone in whose individual extremes of performance, mood and drama, Pakistan swings as well. It was also in defiance of common sense, general convention and modernity. Indeed, for all that professionalism has enhanced sport, it is sometimes heartening to acknowledge that a team like Pakistan still exists, a strong jerk in the straitjacket, a little blip of chaos to the straight lines of order.
Scattered through five years are plenty such reminders: another Afridi-instigated win in Sharjah against Sri Lanka, an otherworldly win against England in Abu Dhabi, a scarcely believable one-wicket triumph against South Africa, the winning of a world event right after the Lahore attacks. The Test whitewash of England—then the world’s number one Test side—in early 2012 in the UAE was among Pakistan’s greatest results ever. They reached the last four of five successive ICC world events from 2009. There have also been Test wins against South Africa, England and Australia. That is the stamp of Pakistani triumph: when least expected, a swift and thrilling overturning of the way the world works.
Disaster has never been far either, lurking, the head-clearing comedown from the highs of those triumphs. Big wipeouts at big tournaments, whitewashes abroad in testing conditions, shocking implosions to unfancied sides; they have robbed the soul of hope and turned the days black. They have sparked outrage and condemnation, and sustained an almost daily demand for the entire cricketing ecosystem to be overhauled.
This too is an enduring stamp and in it, there is the comfort and familiarity of an old friend, heavily scarred but unchanged. The swings, moods and tenor of Pakistan’s performances seem, for now, unaffected. The intrinsic physical style too, for both defeat and triumph, remains as always, irreconcilable to the senses: how can something so beautiful one day be so ugly the next? It is forever unique. The world of Pakistan cricket remains. This partial isolation has not changed that unquiet, not yet at least. Pakistan soar, Pakistan plummet, Pakistan and life move on, as it is, as it was; death would it be for Pakistan to go quiet.
SECTION ONE
THE ARRIVAL
1947–1960
ONE
The Oval Triumph
IT HAD BEEN a long tour by the time the first day of that summer’s final Test, at the Oval, ended. In losing only two of the twenty-four first-class games until then and winning as many as five, Abdul Hafeez Kardar’s very young and very inexperienced Pakistan side had already done far better than most had expected. This was, after all, only their second international assignment and not even two years since they became a Test-playing nation.
But they had been in England for over three months by then, having arrived on 2 May 1954. It had been the kind of stretched, wet summer that drives men mad. They still had a month to go before returning by sea on the SS Batori, back to Karachi and on 12 August, the first day of the last Test, Pakistan’s batting—much their weaker suit—had been hustled out for a paltry 133. England’s debutants Frank Tyson and Peter Loader—the former frighteningly quick—and the experienced Brian Statham shared the honours.
Khalid Qureshi, a tall left-arm spinner who was part of Pakistan’s first Test squad to India in 1952-53 was in London at the time. He had chosen to take up a Pakistan government scholarship to train in England as an engineer and had thus opted to skip the tour. He probably wouldn’t have been picked anyway; Pakistan had a specialist left-arm spinner in Shujauddin Butt, and Kardar, as all-rounder, was by then of the same genre.
Though the pair had developed differences during the India tour—Qureshi’s father, a first-class umpire, wrote pieces criticizing Kardar’s leadership—Qureshi dropped by to see his ex-teammates. ‘I used to visit the team quite often because I had weekends off,’ he remembers. ‘I met Kardar after the first day of the Oval Test and he said to me, “For God’s sake, I cannot wait for this tour to finish so I can go back.’’’
Kardar had taken particularly badly some of the more patronizing sentiments reserved for his side. They had been crushed in the second Test at Trent Bridge and but for rain, would probably have suffered similarly in the first Test at Lord’s and the third at Old Trafford. Kardar’s book on the tour, published the same year, was called Test Status on Trial and before his retelling of the Oval Test, there was a chapter of the same title. In it, he questioned the dismissive coverage his side received in much of the media (other than newspapers such as the Times or broadcasters such as the BBC), asking whether they shouldn’t be more supportive of a young nation.
Even his own didn’t give them a chance. On arrival in the UK, at a diplomatic function in London, Anjum Niaz recalls High Commissioner M.A. Ispahani’s quite undiplomatic assessment of the tourists. Niaz, an experienced journalist and columnist, was an eyewitness to the tour, having travelled as a young girl with her father Syed Fida Hassan, who was manager of the side. ‘He disdainfully called our own team “rabbits” at a reception,’ she says. ‘He said, “What do you expect from these people who need to be taught table manners?’’’
Kardar was not one of life’s pessimists and never could it be said that he lacked confidence or belief. But such was his concern that on the advice of two senior players—the colourful Maqsood Ahmed and Fazal Mahmood—Pakistan seriously considered issuing a statement ahead of the final Test saying unequivocally that they would win the Test. The trio mulled over it during an informal meeting in the game against Warwickshire in Birmingham just a week ahead of that Test. Stuck between trying to prove that morale within the side remained high and appearing too brash, Kardar chose the conservative option and made no statement.
When play began after lunch on the first day, Pakistan’s 133 followed scores of 87, 157, 90 and 25 for 4 in the previous Tests; in itself, 133 represented a recovery from 77 for 8. The batting in unfamiliar conditions was abysmal: ‘unreliable and generally unpredictable’ with ‘a tendency to let fly in all directions’, in the words of Geoffrey Howard, the popular manager of the MCC side.
The second day was washed out, though not before Kardar’s unusually nervy mood came through again. Walking out to inspect the ground with England captain Len Hutton, Kardar said he thought play before lunch was unlikely. Hutton, unsurprisingly, thought otherwise. The umpires agreed and decided to start at 12.30 p.m., but almost as soon as they said it, a cloudburst put the ground under water for the rest of the day. Kardar wasn’t keen for his players to be out in such conditions, fearing England may run away with a lead.
The next day was the pivotal one where the shape of the Test, if not the balance, became clearer. Fourteen wickets fell, 193 runs were scored and champions did what champions do. Nearly 25,000 people watched it (almost 17,000 were paid admissions, so the gate money for Pakistan would be significant for their future growth), testament in part to the popularity of tourists who had played attractive cricket in good spirit through the summer.
Play resumed at 11.30 a.m. but the sun had been out since the morning, gradually drying up a soaked surface. Had Fazal been the god of weather himself, he might not have produced more ideal conditions for his work. He put on the same kit in which he had run through India in Lucknow just under two years before, to set up Pakistan’s only Test win, and settled in to bowl straight through. For nearly three-and-a-half hours he bowled, through the entirety of the innings. By the time he finished thirty overs he had bagged six wickets, and secured Pakistan a three-run lead.
It was a typical Fazal spell; long, tight and unyielding, attacking lengths and sharp swing both ways. Resistance came from the class of Hutton, Peter May and Denis Compton, who between them contributed 93 to England’s total. But none mastered Fazal. Hutton edged a boundary early on through the slips; he then played on, the ball rolling on to the stumps but not dislodging the bails. There was also one confident drive through extra cover but soon after, shaping to play to the onside, he failed to recognize the Fazal autograph—the leg-cutter. It snaked away, Hutton edging it high for wicketkeeper Imtiaz Ahmed to catch behind slips. At lunch, England were intact but edgy. Fazal meanwhile was in the zone; there were 11 maidens in his first 15 overs.
May and Compton steadied affairs a little thereafter but never with any great conviction. Kardar’s athleticism broke the partnership at 56, a one-handed catch at gully sending May back. That was the onset of England panic and three more wickets fell before they reached three figures. Having not got far with a more cautious approach, Compton decided to go on the offensive, often improvising greatly. On 31, he was remarkably given two lives. Fazal dropped him off his own bowling first, running back and fumbling a high, mistimed drive.
Wazir Mohammad, comfortably one of the worst fielders in a poor fielding side, then made a mess of a simple chance on the boundary between midwicket and long on the very next delivery. As if that wasn’t enough, on 38, Wazir dropped him again, also off Fazal. Pakistan’s fielding had hounded them through the entire tour like a determined heckler turning up randomly but persistently to spoil the mood. And they knew the gargantuan folly of dropping Compton; Imtiaz had missed a chance when he was on 20 in the second Test at Trent Bridge and he went on to make 278.
Here, however, he ran out of partners and luck. By the time he reached 50, Pakistan were into the tail at one end. Soon, Compton fell too, stepping out to drive Fazal but only edging another leg-cutter behind. It was, Compton said later, one of his ‘most difficult and memorable innings’. With untiring support from the faster but wayward Mahmood Hussain at the other end, Pakistan was able to wrap up the England innings swiftly.
Spirits emboldened, Hanif Mohammad and Shujauddin came out to negotiate the last hour or so—the latter had been promoted following his gutsy, unconquered, near-two-hour 16 in the first innings (and with a brave innings against Tyson and Northamptonshire earlier). Hanif had arrived in England with a reputation, a child genius of an opener blessed with uncommon patience. He had scored consistently against the counties but his Test scores, on paper, looked thin. The substance of his spirit, however, was unquestioned.
In the first Test at Lord’s, he took over three hours to score 20 while Pakistan crashed to 87. In the second innings, he made 39, constructed patiently over two-and-half-hours. At Trent Bridge, he made his only half-century of the Test series, an innings that showcased the naturally attacking game Hanif always insisted was his; in two separate overs from Statham and Alec Bedser he struck three boundaries each, racing to 50 in 35 minutes with ten boundaries.
Outside the Test circuit, there had been plenty of evidence of this aggression; he made 145 in just 205 minutes, with 88 runs in boundaries against Somerset two weeks before this Test. At the end of June, ahead of the second Test, he had raced to 87 in seventy minutes (seventeen fours and a solitary, rare six) against a Combined Services XI. That was an innings of protest at his demotion in the previous game against Nottinghamshire when Pakistan had to chase a target in quick time.
Now, deep into the third day at the Oval, he launched a similar blitz. Statham was hit for three fours in his first three overs and Loader for another; Kardar couldn’t understand why Hutton didn’t open with Tyson, whose furious pace had so unsettled Pakistan in the first innings. Pakistan raced to 19 without loss in five overs, all the runs coming from Hanif. Hutton switched on just a touch late, turning to the spin of Johnny Wardle and Jim McConnon on a drying pitch now given to turn. Hanif fell immediately edging Wardle to slip and, with the score doubled, Shujauddin went too, a handy, irritating hand in the bag.
Pakistan stumbled at the close of play, losing two more wickets and with a lead of 66. But Hanif’s mini-innings and Shujauddin’s resistance showed, above all, that on the seventh anniversary of the country’s birth, Pakistan was up for an almighty scrap.
The fight continued on the Monday after the mandatory rest day through Wazir, Hanif’s elder brother. Known to family and friends as ‘Wisden’ for his mildly obsessive nose for cricket trivia, Wazir’s tour had been a strange one. There had been some resilient contributions from the lower reaches of the middle order, none more than a 69 against Northamptonshire, which took Pakistan from 209 for 7 to 368. He actually ended up topping the batting averages through the summer, but his fielding was so poor—the reprieves of Compton the most recent, damning evidence—he almost didn’t play.
‘He had been dropping catches and so Kardar decided to drop him for that Test,’ remembers Niaz. ‘However, the selection committee headed by my father and the assistant manager [Masood] Salahuddin and Fazal, all outvoted Kardar. So Wazir did play, and his contribution was crucial for Pakistan. They said later that nobody could face Tyson, except Wazir who held his own against him at Northants.’
In front of 24,000 people, Pakistan lost four wickets within the first hour of the morning, three to an increasingly threatening Wardle. Only 85 ahead, with two wickets in hand, fat ladies the world over were singing when Wazir and the spinner Zulfiqar Ahmed came together in a defining ninth-wicket stand. The union was at once cautious and bracing; Zulfiqar, the team jester and Kardar’s brother-in-law to boot, took his chances. He cut Wardle, before pulling him for boundaries, happily mixing unorthodox defence with fortuitous runs through slips and third man. The humour stood him in good stead; after every Tyson over that he emerged unscathed, he would turn to the pavilion and wave, making sure his more established colleagues were watching and learning how to play fast bowling.
Wazir played a straight foil, an innings of Karachi-ite smarts to counter Zulfiqar’s carefree Lahori musings. Having taken nearly half an hour over his first run, he stole singles to the covers, to fine leg, to midwicket, some sharp, others downright foolish. Through other moments he simply kept bowlers out, concentrating as hard as his brother was becoming renowned for. In this manner, the pair gradually deflated the bubble of England’s momentum, over nearly two hours. Hutton made regular changes, the realization slowly dawning upon him that the game might be slipping.
Eventually Zulfiqar fell for 34, the sixth of Wardle’s eventual seven victims but having helped put on 58 priceless runs. That was the cue for Wazir to uncoil, having gathered steadily. He now opted for strokes in front of the wicket, twice driving Loader through covers and driving Statham straight, making 18 of the 24 runs of the last wicket stand with Hussain. When Hussain fell after twenty-five minutes—having done well to go beyond Alf Gover’s conclusion that he ‘only carried his bat to take guard’—the broad significance of those 24 runs was immediately clear; last-gasp momentum shifts in cricket hold great, almost superstitious, value and more so, in a match with so much swing anyway. The exact significance of it would emerge later.
After nearly three hours, Wazir was left unbeaten on 42, worth at least twice as much, given the circumstances, having doubled Pakistan’s score with the last two wickets. ‘There are very few players who have batted so well for their side at No. 8 in a Test match,’ Kardar wrote later, relieved no doubt he had been outvoted, possibly chastened that he had to have been. England needed 168 to wrap up the series 2-0.
Again, Fazal had other ideas. Another headstrong character not given to self-doubt, Fazal was convinced the total was defendable. Dismissing Hutton, Compton, May and Tom Graveney—the very meat of England’s batting—in the first innings helped. ‘This time I had adopted a new strategy,’ he wrote in his autobiography. ‘I would change the line of the ball every now and again. For instance, I would bowl the leg-cutter from the return crease which was a wicket-taking ball. There was also a hidden in-swinger from the return crease, an in-swinger from the middle of the crease and an in-swinger from close to the stumps.’
In particular, Hutton struggled to pick the variation, playing and missing repeatedly. In the over in which he fell he was hit on the pad three times in four balls. He was almost caught, driving just over covers, which induced a quasi-sledge from Fazal: ‘This is not Hutton-like.’ Next ball he was gone, caught behind, inevitably, to the leg-cutter. Fazal reckoned that over two innings he had bowled twenty-seven different types of deliveries at the great man to dismiss him twice.
But for all of Fazal’s incisiveness, England’s quality still threatened to come out on top. Two partnerships of substance took the score dangerously close to the target. Reg Simpson and May put on 51 in just forty minutes and as the surface became harder, May especially settled into an elegant groove with Compton providing support, albeit cautiously. Hussain was proving expensive at one end and the spinners Zulfiqar and Shujauddin were economical, but without bite. May looked authoritative, twice hooking Hussain for boundaries.
When they began the chase, England had 155 minutes of the fourth day left and when May and Compton were at the crease, it looked like the game might finish that evening. The rush was to prove fatal, because at 109 for 2, with an entire day to come, there was no need for it. According to Fazal, Kardar looked like he knew the game was up. So he went up to Kardar just as the captain was contemplating a change, snatched the ball from him, and arbitrarily told him to stand on the off side and rushed in to bowl before Kardar could change his mind. Wanting to force matters, May pushed at one that didn’t come onto the bat, only lofting it to Kardar: breakthrough.
England’s eagerness to finish the game that day—Hutton was said to be worried about the weather as well—then manifested itself in another vital, strategic miscalculation. The wicketkeeper Godfrey Evans was sent in above Tom Graveney because he was thought to be a more flexible option, capable equally of batting out the day but also of finishing off the game; if they chose to go for it, England had just over half an hour left in the day to make 59. Kardar shrewdly called for a drinks break as Evans walked in, sensing that this could be a moment. Bowlers, fielders and the leader took stock.
It paid dividends. Fazal worked away at Evans’s legs before knocking back his stumps: 115 for 4. In came the protected Graveney and minutes later, he too was gone, leg before to Shujauddin to a ball that kept a little low: 116 for 5. With that, the last recognized batting pair of Compton and Wardle was at the crease. As the threat of an England win on the day receded, the field came in, as many as six close-in fielders crowding around the striker.
Fazal was in the zone, feeling it, dropping ball after ball precisely where he wanted. With a couple of overs remaining in the day, he turned to Kardar. ‘Hafeez, what if I get Compton out?’ In Punjabi, Kardar replied, ‘Then we win the match.’ Compton duly edged one behind, where once again, Imtiaz made no mistake: it was his sixth catch of the game, all off Fazal. England ended the day alive but shaken and dazed at 125 for 6 and looking, as would be pointed out, a batsman short.
An uneasy evening followed for Kardar. He visited Fazal’s room to discuss the match, only to be met coldly. ‘He asked what I thought about the match,’ Fazal wrote. ‘What should be the line of action? I said that he was the captain and that he should know better.’ The two of them never really got along, a tension between them built on several layers.
Both formed separate power centres in the side, Kardar as captain, Fazal as match-winner. Fazal pointedly called him Hafeez—not Kardar as was now the norm—for that is how he had known him before Kardar went to Oxford. A man rooted firmly in the spirits of Lahore, Fazal sneered at Kardar’s sudden transformation post-Oxford into a haughty, snooty and worldly leader. There was also friction from the fierce rivalries of the Lahore club scene; Fazal felt Kardar was biased in not picking players from Mamdot club, where Fazal initially played and Kardar also did, before leaving.
Nothing contributed as much, however, as the rivalry between Mian Mohammad Saeed, Fazal’s father-in-law, and Kardar. Saeed was Kardar’s predecessor as Pakistan captain in their unofficial Tests before they got status; before the tour, Saeed had been in the running to return as captain with the support of many players, but eventually lost out after political intervention, possibly prompted by Kardar. On tour, Kardar was constantly wary of Saeed’s supporters undermining him—not just the players, even the manager.
Kardar spent much of that night wondering whether to open with spin to support Fazal the next morning or opt for a seam bowler. Wardle was left-handed, so Kardar felt Zulfiqar’s off breaks were an option. But he remembered too that Wardle was a capable batsman and had scored an entertaining 72 against Pakistan in their game against Yorkshire at the end of June. The team arrived at the Oval for the last morning in a quiet mood, reflecting their captain’s pensiveness. Zulfiqar, as he often did, lightened the mood by producing a morning headline pleading with Wardle: ‘Oh Johnny, can you stop Pakistan?’
Fifteen minutes before the start of play, Kardar still wasn’t sure of his opening ploy. A senior Pakistani government official arrived in the dressing room, a needless distraction. Only when he left five minutes before play did Kardar finally decide to back his own instinct for pace and open with Hussain and Fazal. It almost paid off immediately, but Alimuddin dropped Wardle at second slip on 129—off Hussain—and it seemed the gaff might prove costly for Pakistan.
But Kardar’s gut wasn’t wrong. Tyson fell after a tortuous half-hour having added only six runs to England’s overnight total, caught by Imtiaz off Fazal. Wardle now saw the need to farm the strike and bat at both ends. Loader came in and drove Fazal past mid-on for an all-run four. Next ball he drove to cover and stole a single, bringing Wardle back on strike. Captain and bowler had a discussion. Deep midwicket was brought in to a short square leg; Wardle wasn’t going to chance slogs right now. Fazal instructed Shujauddin: ‘You put your right foot here, left foot there, unfold your hands and stand ready for a catch. The ball will come right into your hands and you just grab it.’
He bowled the leg-cutter—coming into the left-hander—and Wardle duly prodded it straight to Shujauddin who didn’t need to move. The game was nearly up now. Loader soon skied the deserving Hussain to cover without addition to the total. McConnon and Statham were the final pair with 30 still to get, the former attempting to keep most of the strike. For nearly fifteen minutes they stayed alive. But just before half past noon, not even an hour into the day and having played out five balls of Fazal’s thirtieth over, McConnon bunted the last ball out towards extra cover.
The path the ball followed was perfect for Hanif, running in towards it from conventional cover and towards the stumps. Without stutter he picked up the ball one-handed and, in his stride, threw at the stump-and-a-half he could see. The ball struck and McConnon was short, adding to the misery by clumsily falling over as he ran on and slid. Umpire Frank Chester, standing behind the stumps rather than to the side to assess line calls, raised his left hand instantly, before McConnon had completed his fall. It was a slick piece of fielding not just for the side but for the time as well. It was over; Pakistan had won by 24 runs, exactly what their last wicket in the second innings had put on.
Fazal leapt for joy looking around for someone to hug. Some of the others ran towards Hanif. Some clapped politely as one might after a boring speech. Imtiaz, gloved hands behind his back, looked sheepish as if he might have broken something and was subsequently trying to avoid suspicion. Others loitered around him not sure what to do. Kardar looked relieved, leading the side off with a beaming Fazal alongside him.
Back home in Pakistan, the result reverberated instantly, for thousands upon thousands had been tuning into Radio Pakistan’s daily relay of BBC commentary. Coverage of each day of the Tests would start after lunch in the UK, after 6 p.m. Pakistan time. Either way, this last day wasn’t going to last beyond lunch. Niaz Ahmed, president of the Sind Cricket Association twigged that the Test would be over before Pakistan got to hear about it, so he got on the phone to Iskander Mirza, then steadily working his way up the pecking order of power in Pakistan as defence secretary (he would soon become Pakistan’s last Governal General and first president).
‘My father rang up Mirza and told him about the commentary,’ says Jaweed Niaz. ‘He spoke to Radio Pakistan, who got in touch with BBC and they said they can’t do it. Mirza said, “What nonsense, who is this BBC?” He then rang up the Duke of Edinburgh directly and complained. The Duke said they would certainly do it. And they did, so that on the fifth day commentary started when play began.’ From any angle it was an incredible outcome. Pakistan had become the first—and till now, the only—team to win a Test on their first tour to England and to not lose the Test series. The country had only organized its first first-class tournament the November before, which saw the birth of the Quaid-e-Azam Trophy. They’d played their first official Test less than two years ago. In terms of first-class experience, the players were rabbits indeed; only six of the entire eighteen-member squad had played more than forty first-class games by the time the Oval Test began.
Most of their experience had been built in a competitive club cricket structure in Lahore and Karachi and an even more intense college rivalry between the two great educational institutions of Lahore, Islamia College and Government College. Ten of the eighteen players, in fact, were products of the two colleges and their games. And it was a young squad, with an average age of twenty-four, with only two players over thirty. But only Kardar had played more than ten Tests and the Oval was only his twelfth.
On the other hand, England were a strong side, arguably the best in the world. In the decade between 1951 and 1961, they won fourteen of twenty Test series, winning forty-two out of eighty-nine Tests. At home they were almost unbeatable, winning nine out of eleven home series and losing only seven Tests. They’d beaten India 3-0 at home in 1952, Australia 1-0 in 1953 to regain the Ashes after nineteen years and they went on to beat Australia 3-1 in Australia after playing Pakistan.
They had Hutton, already a bone fide great; Compton who was among the finest; May who would establish himself as a post-war legend over the decade; Evans who was unparalleled at the time as a pure wicketkeeper; Tyson who was just beginning a brief but fiery career as a very quick and very smart fast bowler; and Statham, who was well on the way to becoming one of the finest English fast bowlers ever.
They all came from the finest domestic system in the game. They owned the game and were its modern creators. They had ruled over much of the planet, including the territory that was now Pakistan, until very recently. And now Pakistan somehow had beaten them in battle and shared the spoils of war. It was unthinkable. The players celebrated late into the night and early into the morning at a function organized by High Commissioner Ispahani. Messages of congratulations poured in from all over the world.
Kardar, who had fought tigerishly for Test status and from whom the tour had required so much, was most relieved. ‘With this victory, we had confirmed our status as a Test playing nation,’ he wrote. The next day, nine members of the team that played at the Oval turned up at Lord’s to play Canada. It was another wet, drizzly day though not as miserable any more.
TWO
The Fields of Lahore
THE HUB oF it all was Minto Park in old Lahore, on the north-west fringe of the city and skirting the walled city itself. Much later, its name would change to Iqbal Park, although it was originally named after Lord Minto, viceroy of India from 1905 to 1910 and an avid hunter, curler and adventurer. He was also a sympathetic ear to Muslim grievances, having met a delegation in 1906, led by Aga Khan, in which he tactfully acknowledged that separate representation for Muslims and Hindus in elections was not a bad idea.
There are few more symbolic pieces of real estate in Pakistan. At one end it houses the tomb of Hafeez Jullundhri, the writer and poet who penned Pakistan’s national anthem in Persian and Urdu. On the other side of the road is a grand reminder of past Muslim glories, the Badshahi Mosque, built by the most Muslim of the Mughals, Aurangzeb. Most significantly, Minto Park is where Pakistan itself was born. It was here between 22 and 24 March 1940 that the All India Muslim League held its annual session and ultimately rebuffed the concept of a united India. Instead, it proposed that ‘the areas in which the Muslims are numerically in majority as in the north-western and eastern zones of India should be grouped to constitute independent states in which the constituent units shall be autonomous and sovereign’. They wanted, unequivocally, a Muslim homeland; that they spoke more equivocally of ‘states’, not one state—that was changed only in 1946—revealed the fluid nature of the whole demand and project.
The main attraction of the park now, the Minar-e-Pakistan, commemorates that resolution. It is a curiously phallic, over 70 metres tall minaret, its architecture not entirely shed of Mughal influence; it was allegedly described once by the poet Josh Malihabadi as ‘the ground’s penis breaching the ass of the sky’. It took eight years to build, funds partially coming from a surcharge of ten paise on cinema tickets which went towards the building. It was completed in 1968, a result mostly of the efforts of Nasreddin Murat Khan, a Pakistani of Russian descent who had been part of one of Stalin’s many purges.
It is entirely fitting that Pakistan’s earliest cricket was also bred at this park. It was here that the earliest, most intense cricket rivalries were given space to boil; here that a competitive club structure thrived; here that eight Test captains, including Lala Amarnath, learnt about high left elbows, field placing and using the seam as rudder; a park in which, if you haven’t played, it was once said, you weren’t much of a cricketer.
Little about the park now suggests such momentousness. It doesn’t look epic or symbolic. The grass is green but not lush, and the mix of petrol fumes and cow manure is sharp. There are still fourteen nets daily but there is actually little netting left. The pitches are mostly cement. Randomly dotted around the park on any day, away from the nets, are a stream of informal games criss-crossing each other, where once were played matches that people still remember today. Even then, one game’s slip was always another game’s deep square leg. It doesn’t look any more like a ground that gave birth to anything.
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Like humans, Pakistan was born without a shred on its back. On 14 August 1947, many people dreamed of happiness, of security, of better fortune, of equality, opportunity and justice. But as the sun dawned the next morning, they must have thought, what now?
The country emerged bloodied from Partition, with seven million refugees and hope. There were no government offices; some cities like Dhaka, now the capital of Bangladesh, had no electricity. India had a steel mill in 1947 and Pakistan had only six medium-sized manufacturing plants. The country was producing little and most goods had to be imported. The British had thoughtfully left behind a vast railway network but there weren’t enough trained personnel to run it; the same was the case with hospitals. Offices didn’t have stationery, letterheads, chairs or tables. Food was generally scarce.
They were owed approximately Rs 750 million by India at Partition of which they got Rs 200 million. The rest was held back until Mahatma Gandhi’s fast forced their hand the following January. But this, for a region recognized before Partition as an economic backwater, was a pittance. Time magazine called it an ‘economic wreck’ in 1947; Gustav Papanek, a professor from Harvard who was an advisor to the Pakistan Planning Commission from 1954 to 1960, said Pakistan was ‘among the poorest in the world’ at Independence, and an ‘economic monstrosity’. Only 19 per cent of the 76 million by 1951 were literate.
But a far greater percentage had a priceless commodity; jazba, a combination of hope, spirit and passion. Hindsight may yet judge it misplaced, that this Project Pakistan, with its ambiguously articulated roots and clouded ideals, never had any business arousing such endeavour or zeal. But it did.
People were suffering, of course, as was the country. The father of the nation, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the man expected to navigate those early years, passed away barely a year into its existence. Liaquat Ali Khan, the prime minister and Robin to Jinnah’s Batman, was assassinated not long after. It took nearly nine years to produce the first constitution. Politics swiftly became murky, martial law wasn’t far away and Lahore witnessed riots in the name of religion. All this in more or less the first decade; by the end of 1957, there had already been seven prime ministers and not one elected.
Men such as the legendary poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, who wanted to be a cricketer as a child, and the dark, sharp-tongued writer Saadat Hasan Manto, who followed the game avidly, warned early and prophetically of the perils of what could go wrong.
As a feisty, short-lived editor of the Pakistan Times, Faiz, for instance, wrote persistently of the necessary hardships required to keep democracy afloat, or pleaded for socialist-inspired land reforms. Manto wrote short, acerbic stories on the madness of Partition. And in a series of satirical pieces titled Letters to Uncle Sam written between 1951 and 1954, as the cold war was heating up and allies were signed up, Manto saw the dangers of getting too close to the land of the brave. ‘Regardless of India and the fuss it is making,’ he wrote, ‘you must sign a military pact with Pakistan because you are seriously concerned about the stability of the world’s largest Islamic state since our mullah is the best antidote to Russian communism. Once military aid starts flowing, the first people you should arm are these mullahs.’
Manto died soon after writing those letters in 1955 and Faiz was jailed for his role in the Rawalpindi Conspiracy of 1951, about which little is known other than it was an audacious but modest communist–military attempt to overthrow the existing order. Years later, in an interview in the monthly Herald in March 1984, Faiz said that when he came out in 1955, he already felt the ‘dream of Pakistan was in shambles (sic)’.
But there remained this jazba, like the spirit of a new convert, a belief that even if things weren’t great they could be worked on. Manto and Faiz hadn’t lost hope; they were good men who recognized the importance and dangers early on of such a young country and the careful steering it required.
The spirit was evident in many aspects of human endeavour. Fine work was taking place in Lahore’s film industry for example, which had gradually rebounded from the migration to India of many Hindu financiers (Lahore was widely acknowledged as the fourth city of film in South Asia pre-Partition, after Bombay, Calcutta and Madras and had as many as six studios in 1947). Radio Pakistan was up and running, newspapers were playing an important role; around the Coffee House of Lahore, an energetic cultural, intellectual and literary flowering was in process; Karachi, once a fishing village, was becoming a commercial hub, thanks in large part to the work of Parsi and Hindu businessmen before they left at Partition.
Most vividly, the jazba could be sensed in the playing and organizing of cricket. Uniquely, Pakistan played Test cricket before they had a first-class structure in place. Yet, the club and college scene, particularly that in Lahore, was as competitive, if not more so, than first-class cricket. It was certainly more vibrant, more loved, instilled with a greater community ethos and watched by more people than domestic cricket in Pakistan ever would be.
Cricket was part of whatever little the country inherited at birth. Lahore was already established as a centre. The Lahore Gymkhana had been set up in 1878 (known then as the Lahore and Mian Mir Institute) and cricket matches were played there regularly from 1880 onwards, usually at the Lawrence Gardens (now Bagh-e-Jinnah), a location as idyllic and twee as any village ground in the UK.
Locals were rarely allowed to play there, but there were opportunities for them to play for a few established clubs. Crescent Cricket Club was set up in 1893 by Dr Ghulam Mohammad, an early local Muslim influential who fell for the game. ‘Muslims weren’t particularly educated at the time so it was his good luck that he was,’ says Saleem Khan, a former first-class umpire, Crescent player and club secretary during the 1960s. ‘He had a big family and really loved the game, though he played it for fun. There weren’t any other clubs in Lahore at the time, so they used to play among themselves in those early years.’
The insulation meant that the standard, according to Khan, was poor until the club decided to make Minto Park its home in 1932, where it started organizing nets regularly. By then another local, Q.D. Butt had set up Universal (way back in 1923). Butt—not to be confused with Qamaruddin Butt, prolific writer and one-Test umpire—had been secretary of the Northern India Cricket Association and was also a secretary of the Lahore organizing committee which looked over club matches in the city.
Soon other clubs emerged, making use of as many as fifteen grounds available within the city: Hindu, Muslim and Ravi Gymkhana and Mamdot Club were formed pre-Partition and as the number of games increased and leagues and tournaments were organized, so too did rivalries begin to form—rivalries which formed the basis of Pakistan’s entry into the cricket world.
Underpinning these clubs was a school and college scene of substantial energy and competition. Government College and Islamia College had a storied feud; cricket was merely the top layer of a mix which was founded in class and religion. Both colleges were affiliated to the University of Punjab, an early dominator of the All-India Rohinton Baria trophy for inter-university competition, and a winner from 1935 to 1937. Given that they could call on a number of India’s earlier Test players such as Dilawar Hussain, Wazir and Nazir Ali, Jahangir Khan, Baqa Jillani and Mohammad Nissar—all from either Government College or Islamia College—it was little wonder.
North India and Patiala and Lahore in particular were key feeders for India’s early Tests. The region accounted for nine out of India’s first twenty-six Test players and since many of them were Muslim, those initial teams always had a high Muslim representation relative to their own population: most sides had at least four Muslim players even as Muslims made up a quarter of the population. Once, in the 1936 Oval Test against England, there were six in the playing eleven.
And so, even as Pakistan was barely a country on its birth, to the beat of cricket it was already attuned.
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Once Pakistan came into being, the centre of Lahore’s calendar soon became the Wazir Ali League, which took place during the monsoons, starting in April and running through till August. It was named after the batsman who played in India’s first seven Tests and migrated to Pakistan after Partition. His brother Nazir played for India and his son, Khalid Wazir, represented Pakistan twice in the 1950s.
There is no great clarity on when exactly the league began. Gul Hameed Bhatti, the late cricket journalist and statistician and a Lahore club cricket junkie, believed it was in the early 1950s. Mohammad Aslam Tayya, a former player and administrator at Universal since 1958 says the league began in the early 1930s. Both could be correct because until the death of Wazir Ali in 1950, from appendicitis, the league was actually called the Hot Weather league.
More importantly, at its peak, through the 1950s, it was the league to be in. Organized by the big Lahore clubs, such as Universal and Crescent, the league had two divisions—the top of sixteen and below of twenty-four—as well as clubs, including schools and colleges. It attracted clubs from Lahore’s surrounding areas, such as Sheikhupura and Sialkot, ensuring at the same time that cricket was travelling and settling. ‘I played for Crescent in Lahore and at the same time also started a club of my own in my home town, the Okara Gymkhana,’ says Israr Ali, the spindly left-arm fast bowler who played for Pakistan against India in the 1952-53 series. Okara is a two-hour drive from Lahore, so ‘this was the only club from here at that time. But in Minto Park every weekend there were many, many clubs playing with Crescent’.
Matches were mostly played on Saturday afternoons, after work, from 3 p.m. onwards, and Sundays from 7 a.m. on matting wickets—made from jute—at Minto Park, where concurrent games would be on. Time, rather than overs, was limited. A team could bowl sixty overs in the 150 minutes available to it, and if the other only bowled forty-five overs in that time, well, too bad. On weekdays, they would fix the number of overs; for long it was forty-five overs a side, though eight-ball overs later meant thirty-six. Finals would often be two-day affairs, or played till finish. There was a fair bit of chaos to its format and structures, as Bhatti recalled, but it didn’t seem to matter.
‘There weren’t any qualification rules or anything,’ he said. ‘If you were a club, you could come and play. Club matches were two-day affairs, at least the semi-finals and finals, and mostly limited to one innings. As most people worked on weekdays, they played on weekends. The draws were properly organized and taken out, but eventually it was left to teams to decide when they wanted to play.’
The big games were between Crescent, Mamdot and Universal, generally because all the biggest names were involved. Crescent and Mamdot, in particular, had been needle matches since before Partition, fuelled as they were, by class distinctions. Mamdot was for richer men, set up by Nawab Iftikhar Hussain Khan. The nawab’s father was a key figure in the Pakistan movement, having been part of the Lahore Resolution group. The nawab himself was a leading figure in the Muslim League (though he had been a unionist and so he was against Partition, initially) and was briefly chief minister of Punjab (till 1948).
He is best remembered now for ferocious, intrigue-ridden political battles with men such as Khizer Hayat, a unionist, pre-Partition, and Mumtaz Daultana, from his own party, when no one took any sides apart from their own. These same feuds of landed family elites, unsurprisingly, were the subject of much of Faiz’s early editorial fire. The nawab would also be the first head of the Board of Control for Cricket in Pakistan (BCCP).
Not that that made it any better for some. ‘Mamdot wasn’t a club,’ spits out Crescent’s Saleem Khan, still dismissive years after the club ceased to exist. ‘There was the Nawab and he had a lot of money so they started calling it a club after him when it was set up in 1942. At the time, Universal wasn’t so good and Mamdot had a good team because they had money and could attract good players so there was tough competition between the two. Generally, Crescent players were poor and Mamdot ones richer, so that played a huge part.’
Fazal Mahmood was one of the big starry names at the club though he eventually moved to Universal, and Nazar Mohammad—Pakistan’s first Test centurion and father of an equally stodgy opener Mudassar—was another. Nazar senior, it is widely claimed, was involved in a suitably glamorous fling with Nur Jehan, Pakistan’s most acclaimed female voice—with a famously wandering eye—and a successful actress. Nazar wasn’t a bad singer himself, and was quite the dasher; the affair, it is said, began when he met Nur Jehan while visiting a film set to meet his elder brother Feroz Nizami, a renowned music director.
It ended badly. Shaukat Hussain Rizvi, Nur Jehan’s husband and renowned film director, had her followed one afternoon to where he suspected she was meeting Nazar. When Shaukat turned up, the two were in bed. In haste, Nazar jumped out of the balcony and fractured his arm on landing, ending not only their romance but also a promising career in cricket.
Abdul Hafeez Kardar was also a Mamdot player before he fell out with the club and moved to Crescent, a recurrent theme in the run-up to the club eventually shutting down. Crescent had no such glamour, most of their players resigned to more mundane pursuits such as a career with the Railways, the premier state institution in the country along with the Public Works Department (PWD), on measly salaries. Lala Amarnath was a Railways employee and Crescent star, though he left just before Partition in 1946.
Kardar captained Crescent before he became Pakistan captain. There goes a tale, as believable as not, of his ascent to club leadership that could only have occurred in Pakistan. Before Kardar, the captain was Shahabuddin, said to be among the fastest bowlers in Lahore at his peak. He was known on the all-India scene, playing for Muslims in the Bombay Quadrangular and flirting with national honours but had turned, later in his career, to bowling medium-pace off breaks.
He had actually worked with Kardar on how to play the short ball more effectively, bowling him bouncer after bouncer in the nets. ‘One season in 1948,’ Saleem Khan recounts the story, ‘captain Shahabuddin marhoom (the late) went to his village and was murdered. Now Kardar was no great shakes as a player, but he lived close to the club in Bhatti Gate and he was also from a good family—his father was an agriculturalist and director in a cooperative bank. He was of good stock, educated, and he liked a good time. So, after the murder, they thought Kardar is nearby, he has a little money, he is a senior guy and is trustworthy, so he is a good choice as captain.’
Kardar became so committed to Crescent, however, that he was accused by Fazal of not picking deserving players from Mamdot for national selection on the 1954 tour to England.
Status was important for clubs because it ensured that money was not a problem. Most clubs had sugar daddies or patrons of one kind or another. Mamdot had the nawab of course; Crescent had Kardar’s help but also later Agha Saadat Ali, a fine fielder and modest batsman who played one Test for Pakistan in the 1950s. He was primarily an entrepreneur and owned the Rivoli cinema near Lahore station, from which he would freely contribute to the running of Crescent. He paid for subscriptions, for cricketing gear, equipment and anything else that needed to be purchased. The club also enjoyed the patronage of Servis, an influential business group which would, in years to come, be closely involved with cricket.
Other clubs such as Universal had Q.D. Butt. Agha Turab Ali opened the innings at Delhi Gymkhana and ran it with his money. Various other gymkhanas were run by trusts and in any case, clubs didn’t require much to keep them breathing. A typically precise calculation is provided by Kardar in his autobiography Memoirs of an All-rounder in which he states authoritatively that Rs 100 a month would cover all expenses.
‘The Rs 100 went far because it could look after (i) Monthly salary of the mali [gardener/groundsman] who would roll the wicket, lay down the matting and put up the nets and carry the tin box containing the gear of the entire team – Rs 50. (ii) To carry the cricket gear of the team to the match venue in a tonga and back to the club hut – Rs 5. (iii) For odd purchases of equipment, especially a few cricket bats for those who could not afford – Rs 5 per bat.’
Periodic grants would also often be found and there were enough personalities willing to donate from time to time to various clubs. Somehow finances never seemed to be a problem. ‘Sometimes we used to get Rs 3,000 and we couldn’t spend all of it,’ says Sheikh Fazl-ur-Rehman, a former Universal leg-spinner who played one Test for Pakistan on the 1957-58 tour to the Caribbean. ‘A grant of Rs 3,000 for club cricket and the money never used to end.’
Often the patrons would be the ones coaching, becoming godfathers to young cricketers in the process. Nazar Mohammad, with more time on his hands following his unfortunate liaison, was now free to help out at Ravi Gymkhana. Khwaja Abdur Rab was another, a legendary coach before coaches even became a fashion. Rab was from Mochi Gate in the old city and was chief coach at the elite Aitchinson College from 1938 onwards. There passed through his hands men such as Majid and Imran Khan, Wasim Raja and Makhdoomzada Hasan Mahmood—who was to be another early key patron in the princely state of Bahawalpur. At club level, he was attached to Friends Cricket Club—he would work there with Khan Mohammad and Sarfraz Nawaz—dispensing advice, tips and anything else to whoever sought him. It was all very informal, on the hoof stuff, few textbooks in sight, but much wizened experience to draw upon.
Every club also had one old chacha, a man without whom the club would come tumbling down. Chacha’s responsibilities were administrative mostly, though nothing more important than sniffing out talent for the club. Schools, colleges, other clubs, parks and playgrounds, anywhere bat and ball were likely to be seen, the chacha was found. It was a wonderfully well-greased yet informal selection network, operated mostly by word of mouth and was fiercely competitive; battles were fought often to ensure that the best players came to your club.
The entire scene had a communal feel to it. Money, kit, food, joy and despair were shared. During matches after the first innings, sides would often get together ‘and everyone would sit down, take their clothes off—such was the heat—and eat together and drink water from the well in Minto Park and bathe in it as well. It didn’t matter whether you were Fazal or Kardar,’ says Universal’s Aslam Tayya. ‘Cricket was our nishaaniyat, our identity, it was who we were.’
Players and fans cycled or walked to games together and the turnout for games would usually be impressive. There is no way of knowing really how many would attend but Saleem Khan compares it to the atmosphere at small Test centres in Pakistan – loud, energetic and knowledgeable. ‘There were so many people, often you would worry about getting out of there,’ he says. But the crowd was well-mannered and knowledgeable. People used to call every match ‘cricket ka final’, so the atmosphere was like one. They just loved watching. It was mohalla-based, so everyone from your locality would attend.’
The game was accessible. You could walk to the ground with a player, have a conversation with him on the boundary about where he went wrong the previous over, maybe even have a drink with him during a club game. The gap between cricketer and non-cricketer was narrow.
Beyond the league were a number of tournaments, enough to keep young men, who wanted to, busy through the year. ‘Wazir Ali was the only league as such,’ remembered Bhatti, ‘but after that there were memorial tournaments. Somebody would die and some club would start a tournament named after him. You didn’t always have to be dead either. The Mohammad Nissar Memorial tournament happened while he was still alive. Altogether maybe there were ten in a given year. But these memorials had off-shoots that would last a few years. Some tournaments were played over the weekend or on a holiday and some could go on for months. Many didn’t last but there was enough happening for you to make your club participate.’
And beyond all that, of course, there was Government College and Islamia College.
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Government College (GC) is the elder. Established on 1 January 1864 and affiliated then with Calcutta University, GC began modestly, with just nine students and a faculty of three. Classes took place initially in three rooms in the haveli of Raja Dian Singh (an influential advisor in the court of Ranjit Singh in the early 1800s) in the walled city; hardly was it an ugly duckling then, but still it became a gothic swan of a university, in the very heart of Lahore, just off the Lower Mall.
In 1871, the campus moved to its present address and as a work of architecture, it is among the most exhilarating in Pakistan. The towers and ceilings soar, the verandahs are wide and Lahore’s lush greenery—one of the many saving graces of a city that remains in many ways a large, urbanized village—is given ample space within its grounds. Every grand detail, including the red stone buildings, adds to its aura as one of the haughtiest seats of subcontinent learning. Once Punjab University was founded in 1882, the affiliation switched and though still referred to as a college, it actually became a university in 2002. Though the academic lustre has faded, it still has over 6,000 students now, a faculty of nearly 400 and offers over forty disciplines.
Islamia College (IC) came twenty-eight years after GC, set up and run by the Anjuman-e-Himayat-e-Islam (Association for the Service of Islam), a private body founded in Lahore in 1884 to cater to a range of Muslim concerns. It is known mostly for setting up the Islamia Colleges, but also building orphanages and dabbling in publishing. Every year, it had a mass gathering, where politicians, ministers, men of letters and professors discussed affairs of the day.
‘Despite its name, it was a secular thing,’ said Bhatti. ‘Islamia was not an Islamic college in that sense. It was considered a college for Muslim students and GC for everybody else. Maybe that added to the rivalry.’ At its peak during the Raj, it was regarded among the most prestigious seats of Muslim learning.
The first Islamia College was set up on Railway Road in Gawalmandi. The locality is one of Lahore’s many beating hearts, the epicentre of the Basant kite-flying festival and location for the regional headquarters of Pakistan Television. The jewel is the food street, a long, pebbled and pedestrianized strip replete with the prospect of a heart attack at every establishment. In 1947, another branch of Islamia College opened up in the Civil Lines area and across the road from GC, taking over a building which had housed a Hindu college before Partition. A second all-girls Islamia College had already been established in 1939.
The two colleges were different beasts. GC was home for the liberal, more polished aesthete, attractive to a certain well-heeled elite. The educational ethos was built along British lines. Its very active dramatics society is among the oldest in the subcontinent while IC doesn’t even have one. GC was also coed. ‘Students in GC were from the upper echelons of society, not really non-Muslims, so there was a class difference,’ remembered Bhatti, an alumnus himself. ‘That was the basic reason of the rivalry, not religion or cricket, but the class one. In GC, students would arrive in cars, while in Islamia College they’d come on cycles or public transport.’
IC students, such as Rehman, sneered at GC students, with some envy perhaps, calling them kangi-patti: the term literally means well combed but generally implies being well groomed and well off. ‘Muslim enrolment was minimal in GC and the college was quite anglicized and elitist,’ remembers Rehman. The alumni of GC, Old Ravians (the river Ravi is not far) as they are known, is difficult to better—a liberal, powerful hotchpotch of actors, writers, Nobel laureates, poets and also prime ministers and presidents. Islamia College was an all-boys affair, very much a local institution for locals. Good Muslims, some believed at the time, went to IC and the rest to GC.
But this was a rivalry of the world, built on the age-old ingredients found in all such feuds. Perhaps religion played a little role, though those involved at the time don’t make much of it.
Bhatti believed the rivalry took off in the 1930s. It was certainly pre-Partition. Safdar Minhas was a tall, fast, off-cutter who almost made it to Pakistan’s first Test squad to play against India in 1952-53. He would’ve made it, he reckons, but for ‘differences between myself and the Pakistan establishment’. Kardar, in particular, was not a favourite.
But Minhas remembers, as captain of GC in 1950, his side hadn’t won the contest for fourteen years and that was an issue. ‘One thing in my life I haven’t forgotten is losing a final to Islamia College,’ he says. ‘They had half the Pakistan team then, including Khan Mohammad, Imtiaz Ahmed, Zulfiqar Ahmed, Agha Saadat Ali and others. We were the underdogs, we played very hard and we lost by 5 runs. There was a huge crowd and a real party-like atmosphere, almost like a mela. We won it the year after but I will never forget this match. Our principal, Sirajuddin said he wished we had won it the year before because that was a tough team. They were much weaker the year we won because many of their players had left.’
That intensity and feistiness was a hallmark. It wasn’t important where or how they came across each other, in leagues, or inter-varsity tournaments or nationwide university championships. The matches were always referred to as ‘finals’ because that is precisely the kind of cut-throat games they were. They never actually contested a formal final of any kind. ‘At most, this used to be a Lahore final but it was always the most important match,’ Bhatti said. ‘The winners of the local final would then go to play the GC Bahawalpur or Lyallpur (now Faisalabad) and so on.’
The matches were as much social calendar events as they were sporting contests. Shamianas were put up at the ground along with bamboo stands. Most of the students, their family, friends and whoever else happened to pass by would turn up, full-throated. In an offhand kind of way, most participants reckon anywhere between 3,000 and 8,000 people would often be around. Dhol players were also present, there was great naarey-baazi and crowd chants were dispensed freely and enthusiastically. ‘Surkhi powder hai hai,’ (loosely translated to ‘jeering lipstick-wearers’) IC students would taunt the opponent, targetting not only the college’s coed status, but also an effeminate elitism. ‘Qurbani kee khaalein hai hai,’ would come back the retort, a reference to IC’s Islamic nature.
Predictably, sledging thrived between players and crowds. ‘People used to come from the walled city and swear at us because crowds were big for those games,’ recalls Waqar Hasan, one of Pakistan’s early batting pivots and a veteran of the college battles. ‘Even compared to the pressure of playing against India, this was more, you know. These were really intense, passionate matches. Maa, behen ki gaaliyaan detey thhey. These were mostly from the spectators, mind you.’
The tension was such that a terrific ruckus would often break out: shamianas were set on fire, scuffles broke out, chairs and bricks were flung. Entire matches were replayed if one side took umbrage at poor umpiring decisions. The victors and their supporters would march down the Mall and up to Regal Crossing after particularly tense matches. Some reckon the rivalry was fiercer in the years running up to Partition, when both colleges were split more clearly along religious lines. But it didn’t get any lighter after Pakistan came into being. In the 1965-66 season, for example, the match and crowd got so out of hand, that authorities decided to shift future IC–GC contests outside Lahore. Only after seven years, in 1973, did the heat die down enough for the fixture to return home. Imtiaz Ahmed, another alumnus and Pakistan’s first established wicketkeeper, reckons that the tension of a GC–IC match numbed even the pressure of playing Pakistan’s greatest rival. ‘The finals used to be really tense games with big, vociferous crowds always at you. After playing those, we never felt much pressure in matches against India or others.’ It helped that the quality of cricket, generally played to a finish irrespective of time, was high. The cream of Pakistan’s cricketers was involved. Of Pakistan’s first eighteen-man touring squad to India in 1952-53, eleven players came from the two colleges. Eight of the first-ever playing eleven were GC or IC students or graduates.
Both institutes took pride in their roles. Admission policies allowed students based on their proficiency at sports and with sports-loving heads—GC’s principal Sirajuddin, for example—cricket-playing students were looked after as well, often given exemption from classes and exams. IC was the same and their players were even derogatorily called ‘professionals’. ‘We used to call them that because they were given subsidized hostel rooms, food and days off,’ says Minhas. ‘They were students all right, but mostly it was based on their sporting and cricketing achievements and they were in college because of that. Not many spoke English. GC was better—they had proper students.’
Both actively scouted for talent from an equally competitive and healthy school system. Muslim Model and Central Model schools dominated the scene, taking part in the club circuit and their rivalry was much the same as that between GC and IC. Central Model was the snootier one, but Muslim Model had the monopoly on Test stars – Arif Butt, Mohammad Ilyas, Asif Masood, the Rana brothers Shafqat, Azmat and Sultan, and much later Mudassar Nazar, Saleem Malik, Aamir Malik and Younis Ahmed all emerged from here. Much the same spirit coursed through schools, where men such as Islamia High School’s geography teacher Khwaja Saeed Ahmed instilled in students such as Kardar, Nazar Mohammad and Imtiaz, a basic aptitude and love for the game.
Competition was intense to net the best young talent for your college. The leg-spinner Rehman is an intriguing one-Test wonder. He played his solitary match against the West Indies in 1958, but is better remembered for pre-dating the Pakistan team’s brief lurch towards religion and the tableegh by about fifty years. In his own words, Rehman was a party-going guy, fashion conscious and not averse to dancing nights away at Lahore Gymkhana. God soon pulled him towards religion, he said, and he has since become an established Islamic scholar, author of several books on the religion.
But in his formative years, Rehman was hot property. Straight out of school, both the main colleges were after him. ‘When I did matriculation, I didn’t get a certificate. So the GC principal got my certificate out of a bureaucratic mess because he wanted to take me to GC. Waqar Hasan [the Test team’s one-down man and a GC student] came to my house to talk about it.’ Imtiaz and Khan Mohammad had been eyeing him for IC, and other colleges such as Muhammadan Anglo Oriental College (MAO) also pursued him, but in the end, familial ties pulled Rehman to GC. ‘My brother played for GC as well and they forced me to join GC. But after a year I migrated to Islamia.’ It was a portent perhaps of his eventual leaning, but he played there for four years until 1956.
Later in the 1960s, the strapping, luxuriantly mustachioed fast bowler Asif Masood completed the same migration, though he did so because he thought he may get more cricket elsewhere. Kardar himself was persistently pursued by his cricket-mad philosophy professor at Islamia College, Mohammad Aslam (who was later to be a founder member of Pakistan’s cricket board) to join, overcoming even resistance from Kardar’s parents. Aslam’s own philosophy was simple: ‘A third-class student who can play cricket,’ he once said, ‘is as good as a first-class student.’
The primary purpose of college, of course, remained. Cricket wasn’t a profession, so the emphasis was still on education. ‘Padhoge likhoge hogey nawab, kheloge, koodoge hogey kharab,’ was a persistent message. If you study, you will prosper, if you play, you will not. Parents looked upon cricket sceptically, as you might on a profession with little financial prospects, but believed that as long as the child was also getting an education, playing for Pakistan was no bad thing.
Very few players did not have a career lined up either during their playing days, or after. Even those who were in college on sporting skill alone tried hard to make something of their time academically, primarily because academic progress alone ensured that one could stay in college.
‘If a student didn’t do his FA (post-matriculate) in three years, he wouldn’t be allowed to play cricket,’ says Rehman. ‘So to stay on for three years, he would have to do well academically. I went myself mostly to play cricket, main toh karobari aadmi tha, I was a business-minded man, I didn’t care. But when I failed and went out, I had to work hard and pass again.’
Others knew to take it seriously as well. Mohammad Ilyas, among the first in a long line of talented, uncontrollable mavericks Pakistan produced, revealed his eccentricities early. He had already started playing cricket while doing his matriculation, but to ensure that he passed, the outdoor-loving, naturally athletic Ilyas—he was also an amateur boxer—shaved off his hair and eyebrows and locked himself into a room to study for a few months.
Saleem Altaf, a good friend and contemporary of Ilyas, took up chemistry at GC; he soon dropped out, tried to join the army, failed and eventually took up law. ‘In those days, Iqbal Butt was director of Physical Education,’ says Altaf. ‘He had also been a minister. I told him I didn’t know what to do and he asked me to join law. I reluctantly decided to do so, but was told they don’t accept science students. Eventually they did, on a trial basis and I studied hard in the first semester and got confirmation. I went up to authorities and said let’s get the law college a cricket team. The principal managed to secure a grant of Rs 2,000 and we got our kit and equipment out of that. So in the morning I was here, then in the evenings I would get on my cycle and go down to Minto Park to attend Crescent nets.’
Within nine months of joining college, Altaf was playing the first of his twenty-one Tests for Pakistan, as a bouncy and sharp swing bowler.
The two colleges ultimately helped shape the popular stereotype of the Pakistan cricketer of that era. These young men were not just sportsmen; some were suave, urbane, educated and well-rounded individuals, capable of roughing it on the field before smartening up for an evening out on tour. But they were the exceptions then; the 1951 census reveals that only about 86,000 people from a population of 76 million had graduated from degree college.
And the stereotypes were no more than precisely that. Anjum Niaz says that on the month-long sea voyage over to Southampton, two distinct cliques existed within the squad. ‘Not everyone in the team was Oxford-educated and not many could speak English,’ she remembers. ‘Two camps were formed on the voyage between the team. One was Kardar’s camp and in that was, among others, Maqsood Ahmed. The other camp was Hanif Mohammad, Wazir Mohammad and all these people who couldn’t speak English and were more conservative. They didn’t drink and offered prayers, while others like Fazal, Kardar and Shuja drank and mingled.’
Even those who went through college didn’t necessarily graduate as enlightened men. ‘They were educated in the sense that they all went to college,’ believed Bhatti. ‘Whether they got an education or not is a different matter, but they got some grounding because they went to the best colleges in Karachi, Lahore or other cities. The admission on the basis of sports meant that a lot of these guys were not so bothered about studies.’
Too much education could even be a problem. ‘It was a bit of a handicap, I would argue,’ says Minhas, looking to his own difficulties with Kardar. ‘Some of our captains of the time found it difficult to handle them.’
THREE
Karachi Beats and the Rest
KARACHI WAS GROOVING to a different beat altogether. It could be said of Lahore that it was very much of its province; overpoweringly green, a monsoon beneficiary, provincial, newly urbanized in spirit and development. Karachi, however was barely out of being a desert. It was arid, sand prevailed and trees and greenery were losing what was a pretty one-sided battle to cement, mortar and steel.
The city was built on the industriousness of Parsis, not on the whims of Mughals. There were fewer parks and trees, more banks and street lights. Sir Charles Napier, the British general who captured Sind (and then sent a telegram back home which read ‘Peccavi’—Latin for ‘I have sinned [Sind]’) was governor of the province during 1843–47 and upon leaving, he said of Karachi, ‘You will yet be the glory of the East; would that I could come again to see you, Karachi, in your grandeur.’
The grandeur may not have been there, but it felt like a big city, meshing cultures, ethnicities, attitudes and tensions. As the first capital of Pakistan, Karachi had priorities other than cricket: running the country; making money, as a commercial centre having morphed from a fishing village to a growing port was another. As the country’s only truly big city, people flocked from around the country to see its lights and taste its energetic, perfumed nightlife of jazz bars, live bands at hotels, cabaret shows and belly dancers and the cinemas.
Like Bombay, the Parsi community was key in its early shaping, bringing not only the commerce and drive that runs a city, but also the thoughts, ideas and visions that steer it. And as in Bombay, the Parsis were the first to plant cricket in the city. The region, as historian Dr Khadim Baloch asserts in A Century of Karachi Cricket, took to it readily, establishing itself before Partition as one of the best-administered cricket regions.
Of the first team to travel to England from the subcontinent in 1886—a team of Parsis—three players were from Karachi. By 1901, three Parsi cricket clubs had been established: Rising Star, Independent and Parsi Gymkhana. The scene grew fast, taking in Hindus and Muslims alike, so that by 1932 there were twenty clubs, according to Baloch. In 1916, the Sind Cricket Association (SCA) was set up, pre-dating the birth of the first all-India cricket control body, the BCCI, by nearly nine years. In 1923, the SCA became the Karachi Cricket Association (KCA)—it became the SCA again after the formation of the BCCI (Board of Control for Cricket in India)—a body whose constitution was written by a lieutenant colonel from Hove, England, C.B. Rubie. The body was run along the lines of the Ceylon Cricket Association, the first such body in the subcontinent, and another whose constitution was drafted by Rubie.
And much like Bombay, a romantic but not in any way literal twin, Karachi cricket’s early development was also based on a communal tournament, the Sind Pentangular, which began in 1916 (and was initially a quadrangular). Muslims, Parsis, Europeans, Hindus and the rest played it out till 1944 and the cricket was said to be the best around the region; though not as celebrated as its Bombay cousin, it did much for the region’s cricket.
Nationally, Sind prospered—twice winning the All-India Roshan Ara tournament in the late 1920s, in which teams from Delhi, west and central India and Punjab took part. A few years later, Sind’s prominence was further acknowledged when four players from the province were picked in a team led by the Maharaja of Vizianagram and including Jack Hobbs, Herbert Sutcliffe, the Nayudu brothers and Mushtaq Ali for a tour of India and Ceylon; Sind’s four musketeers were Jeoomal Naoomal, Gopaldas Advani, Mohammad Ibrahim, Ghulam Mohammad. Naoomal and Ghulam were to be on India’s first trip to England in 1932.
Even by the 1920s, Sind was regarded by some, including Anthony DeMello, the first-ever secretary of the BCCI, as the first centre in India where cricket was properly organized.
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Karachi may have been the first capital of Pakistan and the city to be in, but it wasn’t club cricket’s hub. That isn’t to say there wasn’t a thriving club scene. If there were at least twenty genuine clubs by the 1930s, the number had grown post-Partition during the 1950s, to at least sixty proper ones; lead among them were Shaheen, Pak Mughal and Jang CC. There were fewer tournaments than in Lahore and no real centrepiece, such as the Wazir Ali League, but there was an equivalent Hot Weather Summer League.
There were also the Lady Hawabhai and Sir Ebrahim Haroon Jaffer tournament, begun by Essa Jaffer (in honour of his parents). Jaffer was a modest club player, but a skilled businessman and a giant in Karachi cricket’s administration, serving the association in one form or another for over forty years from 1950. The KCA, moreover, remained active, arranging a popular President’s
Cup and a 120-match KCA league where matches were organized along the lines of those in Lahore. A Pentangular-style tournament also cropped up, where matches would be played over a day and a half.
But there always hovered a very urban conundrum. As an economic hub, Karachi attracted waves of migrants and it took in a meaty chunk of the estimated 7 to 9 million people who fled India in 1947. An equation was set early, of too many people and not enough space. As opposed to the vast, open and green spaces of Lahore, there were far fewer such spaces and grounds in Karachi.
The Polo Ground and Jahangir Park near the city centre, saddar, were lower-key equivalents to Minto Park, as was Patel Park, close to the Quaid-e-Azam’s Mazaar (the mausoleum of Mohammad Ali Jinnah) further into the city’s heart. ‘The biggest ground in Karachi after Partition was the Polo Ground,’ recounted the late Munir Hussain, a cricket commentator and magazine publisher who founded Jang CC. ‘On Sundays, there could be over fifty games here.’
Jang CC came into being, said Hussain, in celebration of Pakistan winning its first Test against India in Lucknow in late 1952. It was named after the Urdu newspaper of the same name; the newspaper was run by Mir Khalil-ur-Rehman (whose sons now run the Jang Group, the biggest media empire in the country) who provided financial support to the club.
The Karachi Parsi Institute (KPI) on which Hanif Mohammad was to score 499 was another ground, and the Karachi Goan Association (KGA) also had one, as did the Bai Virbaijee Sopariwala School (BVS). But beyond this, there wasn’t all that much. There were no turf wickets and sometimes, as in some of the parks, there weren’t wickets of any kind at all.
Naturally, this absence of grounds reduced Karachi’s role. Fewer grounds meant lesser cricket and even less club cricket. It didn’t help that the whole cricket set-up was in Lahore, from established players to the senior administrators. So Karachi looked to its numerous and long-established schools for talent, quality and competition. If in Lahore club cricket fizzed and Islamia College and Government College crackled, the Rubie Shield brought the snap to Karachi. Named after the man who had done much for Sind cricket, pre-Partition, the Shield was a highly competitive tournament, contested among eight to ten of the city’s established schools.
Some of the best schools of the city—Church Mission (1844), Karachi Grammar (1854), Bai Virbaijee Sopariwala (1859), St. Patrick’s (1861), and Sind Madrassah (1885)—were established in Karachi’s first great spurt of growth after 1844, the earliest fingerprints of the British. And because the British believed cricket was so fundamental to a young boy’s constitution, the belief was implemented in these schools.
The Rubie Shield began soon after Rubie passed away in 1939; Bai Virbaijee Sopariwala School (BVS) was one of the early recorded tournament winners. The tournament was held during the summer break and would go on for a month or so. The games were all played over two days apart from the final, which was a three-day affair. The matches were played at either Polo Park or Jahangir Park but as BVS, Sind Madrassah and St. Patrick’s had their own grounds, it wasn’t restricted. St. Patrick’s, which gave to the world L.K. Advani and the formidable president and prime minister tag team of Pervez Musharraf and Shaukat Aziz, as well as a host of cricketers, dominated the Shield through the 1940s. Sind Madrassah, the Aligarh-like seat of Muslim learning where Jinnah also studied, took over the decade after.
Matches between these two aroused the most fervour, studded as they were with the best players of the time. Ahmed Mustafa lit up school grounds during the mid-1950s as a local schoolboy Bradman. Mustafa played for the Church Mission School (CMS) and had serious international prospects until cut short by an injury in a motorcycle accident. He was even part of a Combined Schoolboys team that took on India when they visited in 1954-55, a game in which the visitors were briefly rattled by fast bowler Mohammad Munaf and later spanked by the original schoolboy prodigy, Hanif Mohammad. The vast bulk of this side, a nationwide selection that held the Indians to a draw, was formed by players from the Rubie Shield.
‘Sind Madrassah, St. Patrick’s and CMS were the main rivals,’ remembered Mustafa, who passed away in 2013 and ran one of the oldest academies in the city. ‘In Jahangir Park, the games used to be jam-packed, maybe 5,000–10,000 people coming to watch. There was little else to do really at the time. We used to win a fair bit but it was such an important tournament. I came back once from a cricket trip to Mumbai and we went straight from the airport to the ground to play a Rubie Shield final. We beat St. Patrick’s—I made 44 and 96 in that game.’
It was important enough for influential people to take note. Hanif was poached by Sind Madrassah in the early 1950s through their legendary coach Master Abdul Aziz. ‘It was like the Roses matches between Lancashire and Yorkshire in England,’ Hanif says. ‘Half the city turned out to watch the finals.’ He plundered runs for Sind Madrassah and when he went on an annual school trip to Lahore he continued doing the same. A string of big scores attracted the attention of a young opposition fast bowler, Yawar Saeed. ‘He was so impressed with my batting that he went home and told his father, who invited me to dinner,’ Hanif says. ‘His father told me his name was Mian Mohammad Saeed.’ Saeed was the captain of Pakistan’s unofficial Test side at the time.
Soon after, Hanif hit an epic 305 in the 1950 Rubie Shield final in only seven-and-a-half hours and word got around about the prodigy. He was picked to play for Karachi in a flood-relief match against Punjab that September, where he dismissed twelve batsmen behind the stumps, scored an unbeaten 93 in the second innings as opener and won the game in the last over; all in front of Abdul Hafeez Kardar. Not long after, he was opening for Pakistan.
Most schools had a dedicated coach on their staff. Aziz, on hand at Sind Madrassah garnishing his reputation, was the most renowned. He was the father of Indian Test cricketer Salim Durrani, and an immense influence on the development of Hanif. Jeoomal Naoomal was with Karachi Grammar but worked with CMS as well; Jacob Harris, a prominent pre-war first-class player who played in the Bombay Pentangular and Ranji trophy, was shaping futures at St Patrick’s. ‘Harris often conducted coaching classes during Ramadan and students of St. Patrick’s would turn up after sehri, around dawn to practice fielding,’ according to A Century of Karachi Cricket. In a completely false precursor of what was to come, Harris was so keen on fielding practice that every dropped catch, in a game or even practice, led to a monetary fine.
A flood of talent burst through the Shield soon to brighten up Pakistan’s domestic and international sides. Hanif’s Sind Madrassah produced the brothers Elahi, Ikram and Anwar, and Munaf, the strapping fast bowler who played four Tests for Pakistan. Khalid Wazir, son of Wazir Ali, did St. Patrick’s proud, all but playing for Pakistan on the 1954 tour to England. Wallis Mathias, from the same school, went one step further, the first non-Muslim to play for Pakistan. For twenty-one Tests, he was the best slip fielder in Pakistan, a grateful recipient no doubt of Harris’s financially punishing fielding regime at school.
Rusi Dinshaw, the left-handed BVS champion who led his school to the title once, never quite became the only Parsi to represent Pakistan, but was picked for their first tour to India in 1952-53. He remained a peripheral figure, playing only three games during the tour. That was a peak, followed mostly by sadness; unofficially diagnosed as schizophrenic, Dinshaw was often to be found wandering near the Karachi Parsi Institute grounds before passing away in 2014.
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Around the two centres of Lahore and Karachi, similar patterns were unfolding, though inevitably the scale of affairs was reduced. Colleges, schools, clubs, gymkhanas set up by the British, volunteers and chachas ran cricket. No regular first-class structure existed until late in 1953, after Pakistan had already played its first Tests, but through this informal structure, run mostly on goodwill and spirit, the game played on.
Rawalpindi, the old cantonment town, was the third city of cricket. Affairs were relatively organized, according to the late Zakir Hussain Syed, a first-class player for Rawalpindi, before becoming a renowned administrator and columnist. ‘After Partition, club cricket was basically big only in Lahore and Karachi but also Rawalpindi. It was well-organized in Rawalpindi and competitive because there weren’t that many teams,’ he said. ‘For a small population, the base was pretty strong and there were four or five Test cricketers from here in those days.’
The Pindi Club, a gymkhana from before Partition, had its own ground and team. Soon followed Pindi Sports, Attock Oil and the Central Ordnance Depot (COD); the two big clubs, however, were the unimaginatively-named Workshop 501 and Workshop 502. Both were workshops owned by the army where their trucks, vehicles and various military equipment went to be repaired. As well as regular cricket, the workshops offered players employment and a livelihood after cricket. The most intense contests were reserved for the big one, the Pataudi League, but winter and summer regularly brought on other, one-off tournaments. As with many other smaller towns’ clubs, regular tours of the bigger centres were arranged—in Pindi’s case usually Lahore, a four-hour drive away.
The grass of Liaquat Bagh—originally called Company Gardens—was the centre of a bustling school cricket scene as well. The gardens saw the assassination of one prime minister (Liaquat Ali Khan) and would go on to see another (Benazir Bhutto) but they were a home ground for Islamia High School as they took on Denny’s High, Faiz-ul-Islam and St. Mary’s Academy.
‘Many good first-class players came from this small club and school system,’ said Syed. ‘There was one Mohammad Sabir, a leg-spinner, who lost himself to drugs and alcohol eventually—he used to even drink aftershave lotion. But I have seen him spin it on real marble tops. I saw him do it. He was the best leg-spinner we had in the country for a long time and the only reason he didn’t play for Pakistan was because of disciplinary issues, I guess.’
The rest of Punjab had bloomed early as well. Bahawalpur, in the south, bordering Sind and the heartland of the Seraiki belt, became an unlikely centre of Pakistan cricket. Though there wasn’t much cricket there, the chief minister of the Bahawalpur state, Makhdoomzada Syed Hasan Mahmood, was mad about the game. Constructed in the early 1950s under his eye, the magnificent Dring Stadium was a fully functional, multipurpose cricket stadium whose grandeur few venues could match in the subcontinent. Named after Sir John Dring, a cricket-loving Englishman who was Mahmood’s political predecessor of the state, the stadium had swimming pools, squash courts and grounds for hockey and football. It hosted a match against the MCC in 1951, was the venue for an important training camp for the Pakistan side in 1954 and was, finally, the first venue in what is now Pakistan soil, to host a Test match, against India in 1955 (Dhaka was the venue for the first Test).
The chief minister also employed promising cricketers, much in the way princes had in pre-Partition India. Players such as the Mohammad brothers Hanif and Wazir, Maqsood Ahmed, Alimuddin, Khan Mohammad and a number of other Test cricketers made up a totally unrepresentative but formidable side, leading Bahawalpur to become the first-ever winners of the Quaid-e-Azam Trophy in 1953-54.
Further north, cricket was taking a firm grasp. Sialkot, the town of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and Allama Iqbal, and one with a peculiar sense of humour and fondness for nicknames, was beginning to reveal just how it would become such a significant cricket and sports centre in Pakistan. Every December since 1918, a grand club tournament was held at Connelley Park.
‘John Connelley,’ remembers Dr Jahangir Khan, a member of one of Sialkot’s leading cricket families, ‘was an Englishman, a land settlements commissioner deputed to the town at the turn of the twentieth century. He was a devoted cricketer and he set up the City Cricket Club (CCC). But more importantly, he took some agricultural land on the edge of the city and dug out a cricket ground from it, adding a brick-and-mortar, two-room pavilion at one end for good measure.’
Thus was born Connelley Park, to undergo an identity crisis years later and become Sialkot’s Jinnah Stadium.
The Connelley Cup was organized by CCC in biting cold conditions towards the end of December for a fortnig